Budgeting

  Order Description     SCENARIO... UniDate is an international dating agency targeting academic and administrative staff in the education sector. It has been operating for 5 years and has 50,000 regular users in the UK and Republic of Ireland. Its headquarters is located on an estate near Watford which provides space for the IT facilities and staff, and also accommodates management, finance, HR and administration. It has a design and marketing office in Milton Keynes. It employs approximately 75 staff full- and part-time. Alasdair is the Managing Director and 30% owner of UniDate. Now that the UK is preparing to leave the EU, he is determined to make the best of it. He is therefore considering potential changes to marketing and linked advertising sales which might be possible without EU restrictions on data use. He also wants to step up efforts to market into the Gulf, North America and the Far East. UniDate has always used a traditional budgeting system. The Finance Director, Anna, joined 3 years ago but is concerned that this approach might not be the most appropriate when such significant changes may be affecting the company in the coming years. However, if a change of budget approach is going to be made, she thinks it should happen in time for the 2018 budget process. That way any “bugs” can be ironed out before the company goes through more significant changes in the following years. She is also conscious that Alasdair is currently focused on a lot of issues and a change of budget method is not one of them. If she is to get approval she needs to make a clear effective argument. PART 1 a) Explain how UniDate benefits from having a budget and how the budget process helps development of the business. 25% b) Discuss the application of traditional (annual budgeting & incremental budgeting) budgeting approaches to a business such as this one, identifying the key areas of the business which the budget process needs to address (mentioning staff wages, the various departments such as IT, admin and HR) 10% c) Analyse whether a traditional budgetary system is appropriate to UniDate in its planned future form 15% PART 2 a) Define 3 alternative budget systems ( Rolling budget, Zero based budget & Activity based budget) and what benefits they might offer to UniDate. 25% b) Discuss the potential application of these 3 methods UniDate and identify potential problems the 3 different types of budgets could possibly give rise to. 10% c) Summarise by identifying whether one of these methods (or a combination) would be more appropriate to UniDate instead of a traditional budget 15%